Aluminum Foil Whaaat?

For about ten years now, I've been complaining to chiropractors, massage therapists and acupuncturists about some weirdness in my left hip. It's not a pain, exactly, and it's not a joint problem; it's... like some weird congestion. Every new practitioner I've seen swears s/he can fix it, but no one ever has. The procedure that did the most good was, believe it or not, the colon cleanse I wrote about in August. (Which, by the way, my site meter reveals is currently one of my most popular entries--a lot of people really like to google the phrase "nasty shit.")

But there's still some weirdness in my hip, maybe from a lifetime of standing wrong.... I don't know. I just know that sometimes my hip feels wrong and the wrongness radiates down my leg and my knee feels wrong and my ankle feels wrong.

So today I saw my acupuncturist, and her way of treating the hip weirdness was one I have never before encountered: she put half a dozen tiny needles on the left side of my ass, then got a sheet of aluminum foil and taped it to my butt--supposedly the foil intensifies the energetic whatever it is the needles do.

Now, I love acupuncture--if you click on the link above, you'll get to read about a fabulous treatment from two years ago. But the foil-taped-to-the-butt thing.... Even I am skeptical about that. I haven't noticed any marked improvement in my hip, but we'll see if anything changes in the coming week.

Acupuncture has been in the news in England recently -- here is a story from The Independent that just showed up and there was a previous report on the BBC.

I'm not sure what to make of the effectiveness of "sham" acupuncture, as reported in The Independent story, though if nothing else, it speaks volumes about conventional treatments for lower back pain. Nothing here about hips, unfortunately.